


These Flawed Few

by willowscribe



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Bullying, For Want of a Nail, Gen, Growing Up, Hopeful Ending, Hurt Severus Snape, Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape Friendship, Marauders, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), No Character Death, Non-Graphic Violence, Redemption, Sirius Black's Prank on Severus Snape, Snape's Worst Memory, The Mudblood Incident, mentions of child abuse, mentions of suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:27:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28143858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowscribe/pseuds/willowscribe
Summary: James doesn't get to Severus in time to stop Moony's attack. That's only the beginning of the story.
Relationships: James Potter & Severus Snape, Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape, Regulus Black & Sirius Black, Sirius Black & James Potter
Comments: 15
Kudos: 151
Collections: My Favourite Fics





	These Flawed Few

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this story has been in my head for days now, but I haven't been able to get it down at all until tonight. After several false starts and eventually overhauling the storytelling style entirely, I finally have a work that I really enjoyed writing and hope that you will enjoy reading!
> 
> Warnings for brief mentions of child abuse, suicidal ideation, and non-graphic injury.

It starts like this:

On a muggy June day in Scotland, James Potter hangs Severus Snape upside down by the ankle, using Snape’s own spell, and removes his trousers to the laughter of the watching crowd.

It starts like this:

Lily Evans has been drifting further apart from Severus Snape as their worlds change in different ways. Severus is following a darker crowd, and it makes Lily uncomfortable and nervous. Still, he’s her childhood best friend, so when she sees the commotion by the lake, she tells off James Potter for the entire crowd to hear.

It goes like this:

Severus falls to the ground with a sickening thud to the sound of jeering and taunts. Raging and humiliated, he lashes out, his words harsh and cruel, determined to prove that he is stronger than this, that he could still have won that fight, that he didn’t need any help from anyone – especially not a _Mudblood_.

It ends like this:

Lily Evans, stunned by the cruelty in Severus’s tone, incandescently furious over her lifelong best friend calling her a slur, mortified that she has been giving Severus the benefit of the doubt for so long despite all the red flags she saw around him –

It ends like this:

Lily Evans stops speaking to Severus Snape. She refuses to listen to his apologies. She leaves him to the fold of darkness that envelops the dungeon common room. She stops interfering in any of his affairs, including his rivalry with the four Gryffindor boys knows as the Marauders.

She closes the book on that chapter of her life and moves on.

Except.

Except one cannot excise a part of one’s heart without feeling the ill effects later on. Except Severus has been with her for so long that he has become a part of her spirit, a part of her soul. It is impossible, at times, to tell where Lily ends and Severus begins. They are two parts of a whole, a shield formed against the cruelties of the world in early childhood.

Except Lily will always love him, her prodigal brother in magic, no matter how far he strays.

* * *

It starts like this:

James Potter, still over the moon for Lily Evans, sees her rejection of Severus Snape as a call for open warfare. James Potter, who heard the slur Severus used, determines that all bets are off for the scraggly, sallow boy who kept Lily away from him for so long. James Potter, who has always been rich, athletic, good-looking, and most of all, _pure-blooded_ , doesn’t feel the visceral pain of the word _Mudblood_ like a dagger between the ribs.

He recognizes that a cruelty has occurred, but fails to recognize the cruelties he himself has inflicted on someone lesser than – someone poor, scrawny, ugly, and half-blooded – because he has never had to face the reality of his own privilege.

He will, later in life. But not right away. Not right now.

This is important.

It starts like this:

Sirius Black is disowned and blasted from the family tapestry by his own mother. He has always been too loud, too radical, too _Gryffindor_ for Walburga, and it culminates in a massive argument, their shouting loud enough to bring down the roof of their home.

When Sirius shows up on the Potter family doorstep sporting a rapidly purpling bruise on his cheek in the shape of a palm, he is beyond any attempt at moderation. His worldview crystalizes that day: there is no grey area with his family. There can be no grey area because any attempt to navigate that narrow line will not satisfy his mother; she will always be grasping at his arms, dragging him into the darkness that is the House of Black.

Sirius feels as though he has experienced a revelation.

What he has actually experienced is a trauma.

Regulus still lives in the grey area back at Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, but it will not last much longer. Regulus, who has always loved and admired his brother – he is lost to Sirius that day, because Sirius cannot recognize the grey area any more than his mother can. They are staunchly on opposite sides: either with us, or against us.

Sirius and his mother: they are more alike than either would care to admit.

It starts like this:

The feud with Severus escalates. Those last few days of June, when the bond Lily and Severus had built over a lifetime shattered, seem only a distant memory. When they return in September, the Marauders still laugh and joke, but their laughter and their jokes take on a darker edge that they are unable to recognize within themselves. Lily goes about her life as if she does not have a gaping hole in his chest that is the size and shape of Severus Snape.

And Severus?

He is angry – at the Marauders, at the world, at himself (the last one takes the longest to identify). He pretends he is unaffected by the way that Lily’s rejection has rent his world in two, but without her steady support, he finds himself adrift, clinging to the nearest raft, not noticing ~~(choosing to ignore)~~ that it is sinking as well.

He and Lily are two halves of the same soul. Losing her is the same as losing a part of himself.

Severus blames the Marauders for his newly empty existence. (He blames himself, but he hasn’t realized that yet.)

It starts like this:

The Marauders share a gentlemen’s agreement: a prank war on Snape, with each member working individually to make Snape regret ever being born. (He already regrets being born, but they don’t know that, and anyway, it would ruin the fun.) The person who comes up with the most outlandish and effective prank will win. There are no prizes, only pride. (Only hate. Only mistrust. Only betrayal – but that comes later.)

It goes like this:

Severus loses all his hair. Severus showers and ink comes out instead of water. Severus tries to speak and gibberish comes out instead.

Sirius Black holds a less-than-discreet conversation with Peter Pettigrew on the opposite side of the bookshelf that Severus was browsing in the library. Severus hears about the knot on the Whomping Willow. He hears that Black plans to sneak out tonight through the secret passage. He leaves the library with a smug sense of righteousness, ready to prove all of Black’s wrongdoings to the professors by the next morning.

Sirius watches with satisfaction as Snape’s footsteps retreat on the Marauder’s Map. He thanks Wormtail for his assistance and plans his victory speech.

* * *

It starts like this:

Severus Snape is small and scrawny and desperate to prove himself. He sports bruises left by his father and a vacancy in his heart left by his mother.

He is seven years old, and magic is his whole world.

Magic is his escape. Magic is his heritage and his future. Magic will get him away from the father who hits him and the mother who checked out long ago. (In later years, Muggles will recognize her condition as postpartum depression. In the 1960s, Eileen Snape is just a bad mother.)

Magic is Severus Snape’s whole world until he meets Lily Evans and realizes that love can be a magic all by itself.

Lily is too good for him; too kind, too gentle, too perfect for the likes of Severus Snape. He does not deserve her, and even at the tender age of seven, he knows this. Lily is destined for splendor and happiness. Severus is destined for a coal mine or the factory in the north end of town.

But Lily loves him, and he loves her, and it turns out that Lily isn’t perfect after all, but she is _good_ , and that’s what matters.

She makes him think that maybe a boy like him can be _good_ too.

* * *

It starts like this:

Severus Snape is not good, and he knows it. He’s known it in his heart ever since he was a little boy wearing a tapestry of yellow and purple on his sallow skin. For a while, he had let himself believe that his life might be different than what was preordained for him by the hands of Fate, but with Lily’s rejection, he knows that he was wrong.

(Severus has tied his sense of worth to Lily’s love. He does not realize that it has been suffocating him for years.)

He presses the knot on the Whomping Willow and slips down into a dirt-packed tunnel underneath the roots. He does not know why he feels the burning need to discover the secrets that the Marauders keep. He does not understand why they have chosen him to hate in the first place. He gives as good as he gets, but there are four of them and only one of him. ( _There were two of you_ , his traitorous mind whispers, _before you threw it away_.)

He hurries down the tunnel and when he comes out the other end, he is met with a pair of luminescent yellow eyes.

* * *

It starts like this:

Sirius is bragging about winning the prank competition, bragging about how Snivelly is going to piss his pants and be utterly humiliated, and James Potter realizes that something is wrong. Sirius’s tone is off, his words sharper and more discordant than his jovial demeanor should suggest.

“What did you do?” James asks, and when Sirius grins in response, canines flashing, James feels his stomach sink.

“I told him how to get past the Willow,” Sirius crows, and James _runs_.

* * *

It goes like this:

James Potter careens pell-mell out the front doors of the castle, heart in his throat and blood rushing in his ears.

It goes like this:

Sirius Black, the smile still frozen on his face after James’s swift exit, comments idly, “Wonder what he’s all fussed about?”

It goes like this:

A slavering wolf in a dilapidated shack on the outskirts of town lunges at a boy who is so terrified that he cannot even scream.

It goes like this:

A fully grown stag with a massive rack of antlers bursts into the shack and charges at the wolf. The wolf growls at being kept from its prey, but the stag does not back down from its protective stance. The wolf lunges at the stag, claws digging deep into the stag’s muscular haunches. The stag rears its head in return, tossing the wolf off its body and catching it in the side with a wickedly sharp antler. The wolf whimpers and takes off down the tunnel in search of easier prey. It is an animal, a beast, a monster. It is mindless. It does not care what it kills, and it knows better than the fight for this meal.

The stag melts into the very human form of James Potter, who falls to his knees next to the prone form of Severus Snape, whose chest is only barely rising and falling, whose face is covered in blood, and whose left leg has been well and thoroughly mauled.

* * *

It ends like this:

There are three boys in the hospital wing. One is unable to walk because of the stab wound in his stomach that is the approximate shape and size of one of Prongs’s antlers. One is unable to walk because the muscle and sinew in his thigh has been shredded. One is unable to walk because he only has one leg.

It ends like this:

Severus Snape has lost his left leg because the only thing that can stop a lycanthropy infection is separating the site of the infection from the rest of the body before the blood curse can spread any further. He is blind in one eye and has horrific scarring across his face from the slashes of Moony’s claws.

Remus Lupin, when he learns what he had done, is kept under Madam Pomfrey’s strict supervision until she is convinced he will not kill himself the moment he is out of her sight. She is right to be suspicious. Remus has come up with six different suicide methods before the first 24 hours have passed.

James Potter walks with a limp that will never truly go away, even after Madam Pomfrey declares him healed. Years later, he will apply for the Aurors and be told that he isn’t eligible until his psychosomatic limp is dealt with. He will insist that it is not psychosomatic. No one will listen. (No one really knows, not even James himself.)

In a different world (not kinder, not better, just different), James Potter will reach Severus Snape in time to prevent grievous bodily harm. Uninjured, there will be no evidence of Lupin’s werewolf status except for Severus’s testimony, and Dumbledore will ensure that Severus holds his tongue. Feeling slighted, cheated by the system that should protect its children, Severus will stop waffling about where he belongs and embrace the wide-eyed fanatical idealism of his dormmates. He will take the Dark Mark over the summer and effectively sign his death warrant.

In this world, Dumbledore cannot cover up what has happened, though he may try. But when Lily Evans hears that her once-friend has been hurt, her fury burns terrifyingly bright.

* * *

It starts like this:

Severus Snape wakes up after three days unconscious to find Lily at his side. None of his Slytherin peers are anywhere to be seen. There are no get-well cards or candies. There is no acknowledgement of his suffering. There is only Lily, beautiful, fiery, desperately angry Lily, clutching at his hand and weeping.

* * *

It goes like this:

Severus does not accept the poison-laced invitations of his dormmates, and he does not meet the Dark Lord.

Severus also does not allow Dumbledore to bury the attack that has destroyed half of his body.

Severus and Lily are their own side in the coming war – angry, protective, righteous, and inseparable. They welcome all who have been pushed around by those in power, both Light- and Dark-aligned. They do not allow Remus Lupin to be executed for his role in the attack on Severus; instead, they bring him into the fold, teach him the lessons he’d missed after his expulsion from Hogwarts, and work together to develop a potion that will allow the wolf to maintain the mind of the man.

They take in Regulus Black, who has lived his entire life in the grey area and cannot pick a clearly demarcated side. They take in Peter Pettigrew, who has only ever wanted to be acknowledged and valued. And, years later, they take in James Potter, fresh from his third rejected application to the Auror Department, who has never been able to fully trust anyone since his best friend almost committed a murder.

James Potter has changed in the years since graduation. He has not been handed the life he wanted on a silver platter. He has known hardship and despair, pain and healing, betrayal and suffering. His sense of justice is no longer so black and white.

The first thing he does is apologize to Severus.

And Severus, who has also learned hard lessons over the interim years, who has learned about forgiveness and compassion, about how people can change and learn and grow – he accepts.

This is not a kinder world or a better world. It is just different.

But for these flawed few? They are better for it.

* * *

(This is how it ends:

Sirius Black spends four years in Azkaban, and his mother is so proud that she allows him back into the family.

It is her happiness that makes Sirius understand what he has done wrong. (He and his mother were always too much alike.)

When the Dark Lord comes recruiting, Sirius declines his offer. When Dumbledore does the same, Sirius sees that he uses the same tricks, the same platitudes, the same promises as Voldemort. He declines Dumbledore’s offer.

The world of Azkaban is grey. The churning waves of the North Sea, the fabric of the dementors’ cloaks, the cold stone walls of his cell – they are all grey.

When he is released, Regulus waits for him on the freezing shores of the mainland. “Come on,” he says, wrapping a charm for warmth around Sirius’s body, “let’s go home.”

“Not to Mother,” Sirius says.

“Not to Mother,” Regulus agrees. “This place is much better.”)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This is definitely a different storytelling style for me, so please let me know your thoughts! As always, comments are loved and cherished.


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